County Council Care Homes

The council owns 16 homes, 8 of which are contracted out to the St Johns Trust.
The eight in hand provide day care, respite care and intermediate care. There are nine residents from the days when the homes were long-term residential homes.

The Council in consulting on their future. The response has been overwhelmingly in favour of keeping the facilities which are clearly doing an excellent job, keeping people out of hospital and getting them better so they can go home and turn the key in their own front door.

Thanks everyone for responding to the official consultations, signing the petition, writing letters and being on the video which brought your voices directly to the corridors of power. Every part helps. I attended submitted the petition. The strategy and commissioning principles were agreed by the Conservative Executive on Tuesday, so battle continues to keep the excellent service in the County homes which gets people successfully back on their feet and home. They also provide respite and day care to enable carers to carry on caring so people can stay in their own homes for longer. Alternatives proposed are more expensive and don’t provide the same specialist service.

At Lincolnshire County Council, I joined a working group of councillors who looked at the detailed proposals and responses.

The next day, the Conservative executive went ahead and agreed their strategy, which laid out how they were going to choose where people should go in future. This was opposed by the Independents and the Labour Group. We “called in” the decision, which means it is stopped and has to be reconsidered in a public meeting, where I led the debate and we made the case clearly. There is a party whip system that operates, so all the Conservatives voted for the strategy, and everyone else spoke and voted against it. (Vote 8:3)

At Full Council the next day, Liz Peto, Chair of the Older Person’s Forum for NK presented the petition with 500 signatures and gave a good speech to “save Bonner House”. The Unison petition was also presented in support with several thousand signatures.

What next?
In July, there will be a further decision by the Executive to look at the business case for closing the homes.

I have called for the whole cost to the public purse to be counted, not just the LCC portion. More expensive alternatives that simply charge to another department and do not provide the same level of rehabilitation will not be good enough. Just passing the cost from one public body to another will gain no favours from the public.

Borrowing more to build smart new places would be nice, but are they affordable? Who is going to pay for them, when people’s savings run out? In any case, they do not replace the specialist short-term provision that gets people better. It works. Let’s keep it.